Do racial divisions exist on a web where everyone’s whatever colour they choose to be, avatar-wise, at least? I’m picking up a bit of a racial thing in the social media zeitgeist:
● Slate digs into the culture phenomenon around How Black People Use Twitter, wherein I learned about the dozens, an important piece of African American history.
● I discover McDonald’s bizarre 365Black, a website where McDonald’s compares itself to the African baobab tree, nourishing African Americans with “opportunities”, basketball and “fresh” music.
● And the good folks at Pew Internet & American Life Project note that while broadband access has barely increased from last year among the general population, not so for African Americans, whose home access increased a dramatic 22% from 2009 to now, closing the high speed gap by 8 points to 67% of whites and 56% of African-Americans.
There are two camps in the social media flea market, with crossover. There’s the shopkeepers—marketers, community managers, entrepreneurs, developers, media—and the customers, the non-industry people who interact on the framework so carefully crafted by the shopkeepers. The crossover is the fact that shopkeepers are also consumers.
Why? Well, the participatory web has attached your face to your online presence. It’s a Twitter chestnut: ensure your bio really contains info about you and your avatar really represents you. You know, for humanization purposes. Add that to logging in with Facebook Connect to comment on someone’s blog, multiply by an obsession with personal branding, and you got yourselves a web where you’ve got to be on your best behaviour at all times.
Your mother-in-law is, in fact, watching. And just like IRL, she’s affected by how you act in front of the world.
So it’s no surprise there’s a new trend towards social networks that niche on being less than nice. Both Failings—where you invite “friends” to anonymously suggest areas in need of personal, um, improvement—and Unvarnished, a sort of LinkedIn for a$$hole$—seek a social counterculture where nice is not necessary.
We get sick of being too nice. It’s like work. It is work. Social networks, customer-side, were meant to be places to relax and let it all hang out. Then socializing morphed into networking.
One thing we’ve learned in the struggle to come to grips with online privacy is that your opinions, once professed, are forever. Google caching isn’t the worst of it, either—Twitter just “donated” our tweeting histories to the American Library of Congress, for pity’s sake. How’s that for archival? I’m so glad I always delete tweets I think are too mean!
About Face
Being yourself, the only person you can be in these days of increasing online personal responsibility, means always having to say you’re sorry. If you’re a shopkeeper, you probably also have the weight of a company, brand or a host of clients who, disclaimers aside, are indeed reflected on if you go mental on the web. It’s a bit of a burden, this perpetually archived “conversation”. God forbid you have a bad hair day.
Failings and Unvarnished represent an attempt to steer things towards the dirt that people actually enjoy dishing & consuming. Bring sexy back, if you will. There are evolutionary motivators for enjoying gossip, but a cursory explanation is that it’s just more freakin’ fun, more cathartic, more hair-down-letting than always being upbeat and awesome-sauce.
I’d never use these networks, because I’m kept in line by the nonsense drive to eradicate everything questionable about me from the internet forever. But I get what their existence means. People are fed up with toeing the line.
“Drive by Anonymity”
Not surprisingly, in order to function, the bad (re: truthful) social sites collect the dirt anonymously. The attacked is known, but not the attacker.
To help reviewers be honest and candid in their reviews, Unvarnished obscures the identity of review authors. This lets reviewers share their true, nuanced opinions without fear of repercussions.
—Unvarnished About Page
Hey, a return to the original anonymous Wild West flame wars of yore!
Jaron Lanier, a guy who thinks about the web the way God thinks about Creation, says in his humanist exhortation You Are Not A Gadget that anonymity breeds trollishness, potential “unforseen social patholog(ies)”, and that
to have a substantial exchange…you need to be fully present. That is why facing one’s accuser is a fundamental right of the accused.
What he’s saying is you being you is the best way for you to be.
SoMe is here to stay
I think it’s obvious social is gonna be baked into to the web’s crust going forward. People have had a taste of participation, and they liked being the centre of attention. Corporations have had to get transparent, brands have had to respect consumer’s intelligence. It’s the natural shift in the balance of power when attention becomes scarce, and people dig it.
Social isn’t going anywhere, but we still have to come to terms we can live with in the always-on, reputation-based future. We’ve got Kirk Cameron-level growing pains.
Maybe this is a GenX thing; I’ve heard it said that digital natives are quite comfortable always thinking of themselves as having an audience. Perhaps the niceness overload we grownups are experiencing will wash away when the cool waves of the next Pepsi Refresh splash over us, reinvigorating our love for this thing called social media.
There’s an upside to global warming, according to Bill McKibbon’s book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Though we’re going to be challenged by seismic shifts in our attitudes about resources, food, fossil fuels, and money, our social networks may just get a little stronger.
The suburban, Garage Mahal, big box car culture the last few generations grew up in almost completely erased the need for people to meet, know and help their neighbours. We were self-contained, and we were lonesome. The average American lost almost a third of their besties from 1985-2004, dropping from 2.94 to 2.08 close friends, according to a Duke University study.
That’s all going to change when we’re forced to adopt new prosocial behaviour, McKibbon speculates. “Local” and “community” are going to have more meaning when you’re buying your potatoes from Merve up the road instead of paying a premium to have them trucked from the Midwest.
When the resources run out, we’re going to return, by necessity, to the golden rule. And it’s great we’re getting a head start with all this practice online.
Social networks can help transition society from minivans and megamarts to knowing what nearby farmer’s markets have in season (Twitter), where local artisans sell their goods (Foursquare), and who’s celebrating a life-changing event (Facebook). As we shift to a slower, more present (instead of future) pace, the joy of being neighbourly will return. Go on…accept my friend request!
Content. The iPad was designed for you to “consume” it. The big brands that are rushing to animate their brochures so you can consume them on the iPad are sorta philosophically stealing your human agency of creation and replacing it with mind-numbing broadcast. That’s not very 2.0.
5. to undergo destruction; waste away
6. to use or use up
Social tools allow us to create, contribute, and pass along. Different people have different levels of interaction with content—knowledge, information, art—but we value highest the most creative minds: people who create content with a grain of truth in it, be it music, images, mashups, curations, stories. He who creates something beautiful or elucidates the truth through syntopic analysis is celebrated by other humans, and rightly so, as having an intellectual gift.
The iPad has the capability to serve up those creative objects, but the high cost of entry means that marketing messages have the loudest initial voice.
Jeff Jarvis tells us that the mythic social media influencer—whether they exist or not and however useful in spreading ideas they may be—is merely the mouthpiece of broadcast. Marketing strategy dictates locating the widest reach for the lowest cost. Unfortunately for marketers of “content”, the quality of the message dictates it’s spread, not the follower count of the spreader.
Jeff also posits that all actions online—liking, fanning, uploading, commenting—are content too, and they are, to Google and Facebook. Who add their own powerful aggregations by connecting your social graph and your activites—and selling it to marketers.
The meta layer that Facebook ads to our actions is being created for only one thing: to make money. See how Pete Warden’s recent attempt to use ostensibly public data from Facebook to create something a little more meta–and how quickly he was nearly sued into oblivion by the web giant. (Pete was trying to use the content in a way that commented on society, showing interesting correlations like where the most fans of Glenn Beck live and what pages they’re most likely to fan).
Even as broadcasting and passive consumption refuse to die, Umair Haque takes us beyond the social media channel with the idea that organizations should develop a social strategy, using the new tools of connection for a more meaningful place in the world, producing more meaningful stuff (content, if you will—if relationships, voice, and ethics are content).
The tools can do nothing short of connecting people, and we’re squandering them on product placement: the one positioning opportunity you can’t TiVo.
The most important thing to ask about any technology is how it changes people.
—Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
That’s the same as Umair’s explanation of ‘medium is the message’. The iPad paradigm, consumption, and the advertising-orchestrated conviction that every bit of personal data we give up—I like this, I fan this—is valuable content has an impact on us as we conceive of ourselves.
We might be letting the algorithms of marketing conversions dictate our thinking when we equate liking a brand to creativity. This situation was created by us, but not to serve the greater good. The humanist perspective places people at the heart of meaning.
Meaning comes from truth. Expose, expand, spread a truth and you are truly creating content.
The motivations that used to work on people have to be acknowledged on some level, however subconscious, to inspire action. But what if we can’t admit our wants and desires because we’re afraid they’ll be catalogued and later exposed?
Let’s look at fear and the need to belong. The fear that you won’t belong, tribalism. Conformity. That’s the force behind a lot of product marketing: deodorant, makeup, toothpaste.
Wanna fit in? Sure we do. And oral freshness is key! So here’s a YouTube ad (or “promoted video”) that’s supposed to light up our social acceptance sensors and inspire a click.
We’re talking about some intrinsic psychological factors here. Second from the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, is, you guessed it, self-esteem, confidence and mutual respect. All of which perishes in the face of stinky breath. It’s practically vital that we check out this video and discover if we’re going to be outcasted social pariahs or what.
BUT…what if we were scared to? What if everyone found out we clicked that link? What if Google, who is totally writing this stuff down, spilled the beans and let the world know we’re stinky breath checkers?
Isn’t that more embarrassing than the problem it’s supposed to be solving (which might or might not exist)?
The motivation to fit in by not getting caught clicking embarrassing videos is actually stronger than the motivation to fit in by being Scopey-fresh. We’re pretty sure our breath is ok. But we have no idea what’s going to leak out of “secure” places next.
Who wants to own their insecurities? Ick!
This kind of exposure of our base intincts interferes with persuasion. It might be paranoia, but if the perception exists that my attention is being monitored, I’m not going to click.
Umair Haque recently advanced a hypothesis that social media is a bubble, and that when it bursts we will see that we were not brought meaningfully closer together by the growth of social communication.
I don’t want social media to be a bubble, because I like it.
First, let’s define a bubble. We mean an economics-style bubble, like the dot-com bubble or the housing bubble. In this sense, a bubble is “trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values”. So lots of new relationships that aren’t worth very much. I think Unmair was saying we’ve been placing undue value on the relationships generated by social media, both from a personal standpoint (these aren’t real friends) and a marketing standpoint (these aren’t very devoted ‘fans’).
Here are the reasons I feel the shiny, soapy dome of social media’s bubble should be left alone.
The flowering of human creativity
“Thin relationships” are not a new phenomena to society. If we rechristen these friends “acquaintances”, you might recognize them better. Aquaintances are certainly not without value.
Clay Shirky’s SXSW keynote touched on the evolutionary impetus to share and to cooperate, calling it “spiteful” not to pass on information when it’s very little effort for you to do so. This is the link economy in action.
It’s easy to share links to interesting content. It’s fun to add to the conversation by commenting on blogs and liking updates. It’s gratifying to contribute content to the collective by taking photos, writing essays (blog posts), illustrating, designing fonts and photoshop brushes, and shooting funny videos. It’s meaningful to lead culture and capture the zeitgeist by giving birth to memes, defining ideas, pushing for human thought development.
The more the merrier
Thin relationships, or “weak connections” make these upper-Maslow interactions possible. You don’t need a high level of investment in someone to trade ideas. Their input is valuable precisely because they come from a different perspective, and aren’t bound by politeness or concern for your ego. I’ve mentioned the findings that novel input from new friends sparks more innovative, creative solutions. The more the merrier.
Marketing soap
From a marketing standpoint, I hate to put the idea out there (there being Google search) that we’re overestimating the worth of social media and it’s practitioners. It could sour corporate decision makers who ponder how much to invest in newfangled media.
This isn’t about protecting our jobs, it’s about making them better. My firm belief is that all marketing, communication, PR, customer service and sales efforts (not to mention internal communications) can be enhanced and made more worthwhile and productive by conversing instead of broadcasting. I don’t think organizations have a choice, because public expectation of brands/services/orgs has changed.
This being a nascent revolution in the mainstream, still, I don’t want to throw the word b-word around. I want to work to show that teaming up with customers to get them what they want is going to succeed.
Zomg, my husband finally got a new iPhone, so we can go GPS crazy! I’ve got an experiment all lined up for us.
In my generalized paranoia over personal #privacy, I thought I’d just run screaming in the other direction and force myself into exposure therapy with some location-aware mobile technology.
2010 is the Year of The Mobile, dontcha know. There’s been a lot of buzz about using the data that’s lying all over the place to make life more interesting, exploiting social networking to have more fun IRL, marketing to people in context, and coming to terms with never, ever being off the grid again.
That all sounds neat, so I fired up the ole’ App Store and downloaded me Where the Flock. This app does one thing: let you and whoever you authorize see where each other are on a Google map.
As I’m not a bar-hopping teenager, the only person whose whereabouts concern me on a regular basis are my husband‘s, so I installed the app and invited him to share. Would he think this coolio idea was convenient or creepy? I was like Hey, if this is too privacy-invasive, we can uninstall, man.
But he totally got it. Just as text messaging was a boon to those who’s lives are too time-sensitive to bear the pleasantries associated with a phone call, now no one has to be bothered answering the question “Are you still at work?”
The app not only shows you where your previously uncharted spouse is, it tells you how fast they’re moving. This is, in theory, so you know if they’re driving, stuck in traffic, ambling along procrastinatorily, or speeding (which I assume is reported instantly to the police. I hope I’m kidding). The practical result I can see of broadcasting my velocity is getting mocked mercilessly for my incredibly slow pace when I’m out for a run.
The Mr. did have a condition for using the app: that our location data was only shared between us. That’s cretainly my preference too, and my assumption. I turned on the app and saw that I had to log in with my Google account. Not to worry, the app assured me, only Google’s servers would have my information. Oh, just those guys, eh?
A little paranoid, I emailed the developers for clarification. I don’t have a Google Profile or use Google Buzz, on purpose style, and I didn’t want to suddenly find out the universe could see me flashing like a neon sign every time they used a Google Map. I’m famously, pointlessly stingy with my personal data where The Goog is concerned.
Troy, the app author, swiftly informed me that the hilariously-acronymed WTF doesn’t, in fact, actually share your location with Google, so we were all set.
While this was happening, I got a nice message from a Twitter followee, welcoming me to followerhood. I clicked through to her website, only to have it tell me exactly where I was located.
Well, that’s a pretty weird WordPress plugin or whatever, I thought, and unnecessary from a mar-com standpoint. There I am though. Little Canadian flag.
Not that I’m drinking the Kool-Aid, but this location pwnage on the day of my long-awaited husband-tracking experiment reinforces to me what I already know but refuse to admit: #privacy is dead, get over it.
I googled that, looking for a reference. Lots of YouTube results. I clicked through. And bloody spying bloody YouTube told me (based on the evening’s clickings) I might like to check out some Daft Punk, or perhaps my current flavourite Gogol Bordello, and maybe a drugged-up kid after the dentist.
Not because I’d watched the high kid video since 1985, but because recently I’d read on CNN that the dad who filmed poor David had retired on the YouTube ad income. “They” don’t admit that they watched me read CNN. “They” say it’s because I like Daft Punk.
Admittedly, I stay logged in to Google all the time. I have to; I’m a GoogleDocs turbo user. That’s how YouTube knows what I was reading on CNN. Now I realize that’s akin to asking Google to stalk me. I might go check out that “Sziget” song, though…
Good thing it’s Earth Hour & I’m blogging by candlelight. I have a powerful urge to go off the grid and go fabricate me a tinfoil helmet.
Do racial divisions exist on a web where everyone’s whatever colour they choose to be, avatar-wise, at least? I’m picking up a bit of a racial thing in the social media zeitgeist:
